THE QUARRY RESEMBLED THE MOON

Brian Dillon

But the closer I came to these ruins, the more any notion of a mysterious
isle of the dead receded, and the more I imagined myself among the
remains of our own civilization after its extinction in some future
catastrophe.
W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (1995)

The work of Brendan Earley corrals some of the most resonant

artistic and cinematic reference points of the twentieth century
into a practice that is by no means telegraphic or otherwise
literal-minded in its deployment of such touchstones, but instead
sublimes them into the artists own alchemical adventure with
abject and precious materials, urban and exurban ruins, the
remnants and potential reanimations of Modernism and its
aftermaths. Among the figures who comprise this constellation
are (in roughly chronological order) Le Corbusier, Robert
Smithson, Robert Morris and Andrei Tarkovsky. They appear, one
might say, as especially insistent coordinates for many artists of
the past decade or so. A particular conjunction of the legacies of
Modernism, Land Art and Minimalism conspires in our present
moment with a more melancholy filmic inheritance to produce,
as it were, a map of the degradation of past architectural and
artistic movements, projected in Earleys case onto more localized
and pressing concerns. But it is still relatively uncommon to
find this perplex of interests addressed in a way that eschews
narrative, homage or frankly nostalgic footstepping of the artists
avowed precursors, essaying in place of those familiar strategies
a labour of meticulous making, an exploration of ambiguous
materials, lines, surfaces and forms. Earleys sculptures and
drawings constitute an intervention into apparently familiar
territory that is at once oblique and immersive.
 Consider his attachment to the work of Tarkovsky, and
especially to the directors 1979 film Stalker. The enigmatic
ruin-guide of the films title appears in a number of Earleys
drawings, slumped in a reverie inside the wreckage of the
Zone: the mysterious landscape that promises and may well
deliver: the outcome is unclear a quasi-mystical fulfilment of
the protagonists deepest desires. The Stalker lies sodden and
dreaming among unlikely and sometimes obscure detritus: he
turns his gaze away from the surrounding military and industrial
ruins, and towards a less legible stratum of organic and inorganic
decay. In this desolate fugue state, he is attended by a stray dog:
the image was used for the films poster in 1979, and in Earleys
drawing Lying Awake in an Empty Building is reduced to a sort of
ragged schematism its instantly recognizable but also of a piece
with other instances in these drawings of lone and somewhat
wryly romanticized artist-explorers: Smithson filmed from
above as he reaches the terminal point of his Spiral Jetty, Morris
obscurely got up as an occultish figure from a Black Sabbath
album cover.
There is a level of properly Romantic wandering involved here,
a motif of the artist as lone figure in a ruinous landscape, to which
Earley, who says that walking is a crucial part of his quotidian
practice, is hardly immune. Such excursions, after all, frequently
yield materials for the sculptures themselves even if Earley long
ago abandoned the stricture he devised for himself as a student:
that he would only make work from objects discovered on the
street. There is still a sense in his art of engaging the happenstance
fabric of the city a burned out dustbin, or a flatpack sculpture
of the artists own devising subsequently torched overnight on
waste ground and the materials of daily life in late (and ailing)
capitalism: discarded packaging, leftover building materials from
a vanished housing and development boom.
A singular image in Stalker seems to define Earleys approach
to such materials, though it is not actually replicated in his work.
It occurs late in the film as the Stalker and his companions, who
have paid to be inducted into the lore of the Zone and to pursue
its alluring promise, are beginning to penetrate the built core
of the place, through dark portals and along dank passageways.
As frequently happens in Tarkovsky, there is a cut to an image
that seems to show part of the same scene or the same space, but
whose exact subject is unclear. It looks, perhaps, like the bottom
of a well, in which the water is roiling and pale, and it resembles
nothing so much as the strange fogged planet of the directors
1972 film Solaris: a surface that seems to spawn precise and
aching dreams or hallucinations of home. Its the ambiguity of
the image in Stalker, and the surface it shows, that strikes me as
instructive where Earleys work is concerned. Time and again he
proposes substances and surfaces that are not what they seem,
that haze and elide distinctions between the throwaway and
the permanent. (Though both sides of the material equation are
clearly also designed, architectural, even utopian in form.)
Take one substance that recurs throughout the sculptural
works. Styrofoam is among the most ubiquitous of contemporary
materials, pumped and extruded into so many of our daily
encounters with the made and built environment, whether as
packaging or insulation. Earleys castings from discarded bits of
styrofoam rescued, for example, from the packaging of a new
computer discover forms that seem to draw on several styles
of the past century: in January, the Janus-faced artefacts seem to
rhyme with volumes and lines from Modernist architecture and
Minimalist sculpture, while their tubular steel support situates
the whole enigmatic assemblage in some fantasized interior of
the middle of the twentieth century. But its the material surprise
that is most telling; the styrofoam, which looks like concrete, is
in fact aluminium: the material mimics both the solidifying stuff
of Modernist construction and the ephemera of contemporary
commodity culture. There is a sort of materialist pun in play:
one thinks of Marxs claim that in the era of the commodity All
that is solid melts into air. The immaterialization of goods and
labour, of which the flyaway, particulate packaging might be
said to provide an allegory, is here reversed, but not quite: the
substituted metal has its place too in the history of lightweight
construction and mass production. The sculpture is at least two-
faced and probably more: pointing to a number of historical
junctures at the same time that it shocks with its palpable
presence and resistance to touch or decay.
There is a curious anthropomorphism to these castings
from styrofoam and the sculptures of which they are part its
especially true of Pilgrim, with its hooded crystal face, or Soul
Delay with its silver cowl of insulation. But it is evident too in
A Million Years Later: a floor-mounted complex slab of oil-black
bronze that seems to have leaked a puddle of inky silicon onto
the gallery floor: the piece is at once an image of industrial or
environmental disaster (Earley reminds us that many of the
materials he works with are products of the petrochemical
industry) and a picture of some more bloody and grisly event. But
again its the architectural element that is really compelling here:
A Million Years Later looks like nothing more or less than the
ruins of a late-Modernist complex, the styrofoam original scuffed
and slumped in places, the whole subject to an unthinkably long
degradation and yet still standing, still maintaining its solidity
and form. In his 1911 essay The Ruin, the sociologist Georg
Simmel argued that ruins embody an uneasy accommodation
or equilibrium between the artificial and the natural, between
architectural ambition and the organic processes of decay.
Simmel had in mind the ruin as figured by the ruin aesthetics
of the Romantic period, but his definition might equally stand
as a premonition of the fate of the Modernism then under way
in Europe: a Modernism that Earley laconically renders in his
Dwelling in the Mountains 2, with its chipboard and foam
approximation of a Corbusian structure in peril.
The second of those figures that ghosts Earleys work, Robert
Smithson, is crucial here as well as in the drawings that explicitly
refer to and appropriate images from his work. In A Tour of the
Monuments of Passaic, his celebrated 1967 essay for Artforum,
Smithson travels to the post-industrial hinterland of the New
Jersey town of his birth, and discovers there a ruinous territory
that makes of Passaic the Eternal City of the late twentieth
century. Its in this essay that Smithson formulates his concept
of ruins in reverse: contemporary structures that rise into ruin
rather than collapsing into decay in a picturesque mode: This
anti-romantic mise-en-scne suggests the discredited idea of
time and many other out of date things. But the suburbs exist
without a rational past and without the big events of history.
Oh, maybe there are a few statues, a legend, and a couple of
curios, but no past just what passes for a future. A Utopia minus
a bottom, a place where the machines are idle and the sun has
turned to glass.
It is easy to invoke such a decayed vision of architectural and
infrastructural modernity in the aftermath of economic collapse
in Ireland, to see the unfinished building projects of the late-
boom era as having risen into ruin. Earleys is not exactly a
straightforward citation of Smithsons artistic investment
in the dialectical landscape: the site that is being built and
demolished in the same instant. Rather, he is interested in the
material potential today for such a way of seeing: the work that
either refers explicitly to, or seems to reanimate some aspect
of Smithsons ruinous view of half-built suburbs, does not feel
especially melancholic or retrospective. It seems instead to be
about certain material ambiguities in the present. Even when
the materials in question, such as plaster board and silver
insulation, clearly derive from the very recent disintegration
of the Irish Building trade. In this case, the sculptural wall
in question, entitled ?????, is not to be understood as simply
a found object from that recent history, but as a spatial
anomaly and a surface every bit as enigmatic as the bronze
and aluminium castings. The wall is a vast reflector, inviting
Earleys other works and the viewer into its blurred and silvery
Zone: blurred, that is, until you approach it and find that up
close, a few inches from the surface, your own face suddenly
comes into focus.
In the end, beyond the profusion of reminders and
references that Earleys work provokes, and beyond the recent
environmental and economic history that it broaches, it is
perhaps this effect and others like it that persist. For all its
material heft and presence (in the case of the sculptures) and
its knowing play with artistic precursors (in the case of the
drawings), Earleys work has a peculiar quality of visual and
material oscillation, of threatening to fade from view. This is
assuredly one of the effects of the large-scale felt-tip drawings
such as A Place Between and Red Sky at Night, where the artist
has laboured at length, with modest and everyday materials,
in the name of a rigorous linearity, and then, his lines curving
towards the horizon, abruptly vanished.
Brian Dillon is UK editor of Cabinet magazine and Tutor in Critical
Writing at the Royal College of Art. He is the editor of Ruins (MIT
Press/Whitechapel Gallery, 2011) and author of I Am Sitting in a
Room (Cabinet, 2012), Sanctuary (Sternberg Press, 2011), Tormented
Hope (Penguin, 2009) and In the Dark Room (Penguin, 2005). He
writes regularly for the Guardian, London Review of Books, frieze and
Artforum. He lives in Canterbury.